Embodiments of the invention described in this specification relate generally to contact information organizing and sharing, and more particularly, to organizing, synchronizing, and sharing cumulative contact information.
Contact information is useful in a variety of applications, such as voice, text, scheduling, etc. Typically, a person maintains a list of contacts and retrieves each contact profile as needed (e.g., to make a call, to send a text message, to schedule an event or meeting, etc.). However, managing contacts is a challenge, especially when contact profiles typically increase in scope (e.g., name, address, primary phone, work phone, other phone, primary email, secondary email, etc.) as time goes on, and when the number of contacts a person knows tends to increase over time. Managing the contacts becomes a nightmare when information is missed (e.g., a contact moved, resulting in an updated address, and possibly updated phone number(s) and/or email address, etc.).
In addition, the number of mobile devices and other electronic devices available in the market, and the number of mobile devices and other electronic devices that individuals use, have increased dramatically over recent decades. In view of the proliferation of mobile devices used by people (or “users”) at work, in personal scenarios, between family members, etc., the possibility of having redundant contact information or duplicated contacts is ever-present. This is a problem for most users who rely on manual updating of contact information. For instance, when a user (“User 1”) interacts with another user (“User 2”), either User 1 or User 2 (or both) may relay updated contact information or provide contact details of another mutually related person. However, it is typically not the case that either User 1 or User 2 will have all of their mobile devices or electronic devices at their behest. As a result, any manual update that occurs will need to be replicated later on other devices. Yet this typically does not occur, for various reasons (forgetting, unable to find other devices, etc.). Thus, there are some devices that have a contact with a set of contact details, while other devices may (or may not) have the same contact, but have only a limited subset of the contact details.
Currently available systems involve manually updating each contact's information field. Such methods are very time consuming and still not always accurate, virtually leaving very little room for keeping everyone's contact information up to date.
Therefore, what is needed is a way to organize, synchronize, and share cumulative contact information between computing devices of several users, where such computing devices include traditional computing devices, such as desktop and laptop computers which may include wired or wireless network interfaces for synchronizing contact information, and mobile devices with wireless network interfaces, such as mobile phones, smartphones, tablets, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and other such electronic devices in which local persistent storage devices or memory units store contact details of different people.